Mobile Platform you say?

As part of the Mobile MUSE project, I have been involved in creating a platform of multi-media services for mobile devices.  We'll get to what that means in a minute, but I'd like to explain some of the rationale and concepts behind the motivation for the platform.

One of the problems in delivery content to mobile devices is barrier to entry for developers.  These barriers take many forms.  These barriers invariably fall into three different categories:

• Financial - it can be difficult for small cap companies in early development phases to afford the investment required to begin working in the mobile space.
• Technical - At the end of the day, mobile devices differ radically from each other in terms of capabilities and even implementations of standard level technologies.  This situation is in stark contrast to the traditional Internet world where PC's generally support a myriad of standard and de-facto standard implementations.  Usually the biggest headache for Internet developers is accounting for two different browsers: IE and Firefox.  The mobile world should be so lucky.
• Business - Multiple wireless network operators put up various barriers - some technical, some financial - that make it difficult to create generic cross-carrier content.

The platform that's been developed for Mobile MUSE is an attempt to redress these barriers and provide a more hospitable environment for rich-media content development.

As an example, it is almost impossible to deploy any reasonable content without a short code.  A short code enable delivery of text messages either in a pull or push fashion.  Text messages however can provide the gateway to other richer services thru something as simple as including a URL in the text message.

However, short codes are EXPENSIVE to acquire and EXPENSIVE to maintain - usually prohibitively so for embryonic companies.  The Mobile MUSE platform as part of the mandate for the Mobile MUSE research project has a short code that is available to member companies at no cost to them for the duration of the research.

Beyond that however, the platform provides a robust environment of multiple developer subscription.  This model allows multiple developers to share the resources offered by the platform - in this example sharing the short code.  The platform offers a self-service subscription model where developers can register and select the services to which they wish to avail themselves.  Because the services are shared, mechanisms are defined to allow concurrent usage of these shared resources.

Beyond simple text messaging, however, the mobile MUSE platform provides similar mechanism for sending and receiving multi-media messages (MMS) - again using a shared allocation mechanism.

And beyond that, the mobile MUSE platform provides a content transcoding service that enable rich multi-media content (such as images and videos) to be adapted and formatted on demand to the wide variety of handsets and carrier networks.

Finally the mobile MUSE platform provides a gateway to VoiceXML services that enable application to engage in rich IVR applications that couple nicely with existing Internet technologies - again in a shared resource manner.

The result is a multi-functional platform that is designed to support multiple developers using multiple services - most of which are shared, but conceptually can be exclusive as well.

All these services are made available thru standard SOAP web service style interfaces.  This permits content developers to use the tools appropriate for their own application, yet leverage the services available on the Mobile MUSE platform.

All of the Mobile MUSE projects to date have used the services of the platform to some extent.  The platform continues to evolve is ready for adoption but more projects as they come online.

The lasting legacy of this development will be the ongoing usage of reusable mobile technologies that can be quickly reused for new projects.  And that - is something that the entire mobile community in Vancouver can use!

Check out the Mobile MUSE developers' platform at developers.mobilemuse.ca